Creating Intercultural Bridges In the Amazonian & Andean Indigenous Healing Traditions
posted by Roman Hanis on January 14th, 2012
Although the original tradition of sacred and medicinal plants in the Amazonian culture has been considered in the past to be a profound pathway towards the enlightened nature of the original ancestors, in time it has become fragmented and misinterpreted due to the commercialization and the invasion of western culture. While still retaining the methods that invoke the base of natural forces, the Amazonian culture today has lost the clear non-dual direction to channel these forces towards the highest good, as was initially intended.
A vast majority of the organizations in the Amazon today working with the sacred plants such as Ayahuasca in the ceremonial context can be described in two distinct groups.
The first group contains the organizations started by foreigners that although started them with good intentions have never themselves been fully initiated into the curandero shamanic tradition and without real understanding of what these traditions are about just hire various local shamans, to basically offer a mystical adventure and an exotic tourist attraction. People who go to this type of spiritual retreat leave them with very excited colorful experiences yet with no real practical basis of understanding how to implement what they just went through into their everyday life beyond just a story to tell their friends.
The second group is the local indigenous and mestizo shamans operating a fragmented part of the original Sacred Science. They do so in the intuitive manner usually for the sake of spiritual and material powers, omitting the original concept of enlightenment, while additionally lacking the understanding of western mentality and worldview. People who come to this group to participate and learn encounter a much externalized and overly mystified, often very obscure system of knowledge that most of the time leaves these people on the extreme of mystical interpretation and subject to external forces without any point of reference to the inner process of transformation.
The work of the Paititi institute is dedicated to the study of the Amazonian spiritual and medicinal tradition in the way that it was practiced originally before the fragmentation has occurred in this culture.
Thus the main focus of the Paititi institute’s work is creating intercultural bridges between the Amazonian tradition and the world today so that these profound practices and tools can be utilized for the purpose of direct and practical implementation of consciousness transformation and deconditioning into the original primordial enlightened essence un-obscured by over mystification or conceptualization.
The institute includes members that originally came from the western culture and have gone through the traditional three year initiation period while additionally dedicating to practice and comparative studies of world spiritual disciplines. This experience in addition to that of interacting with local medicine men and women for many years can bring about a practical, sober and direct way that can implement this tradition in daily life for long term benefit. We currently involve in our retreats and the department of indigenous cultural studies both mestizo and indigenous medicine men and women from the Yagua, Shipibo, Whitoto, Ashuar, Machiguenga and Huachipari traditions.
The result is a full activation of infinite human potential for the purpose of healing and evolutionary enlightenment.
